Those weird tiles on the west side of the road represent the holes in this game.

Them's Fightin'
Words

The game entry has no screenshot and has two sentence fragments of information. Is it a 10 minute newbie game? Oh, you bet it is. However, this demo really does have some definite advantages over your typical newbie game. Advantage number one: the author and his/her friends do not seem to be featured in this game. Astounding!

This game is described as "Army type." So your heroes are actually armies rather than single people.

I have to point out that there are NO VERBS in the game entry's description. Now, a grammatically correct description might have left the entry with nothing to catch my attention, but it's still not a good idea. Verbs are your friends.

Graphics

Uh, that's a no. The best part is that you can tell what things are. Mostly. The maptiles are completely griddy. Now, since this is supposed to be a war game that could actually be a good thing, if the tiles were trying to mimic the style of old NES/SNES strategy games. But they just look like your typical OHR stuff. I think there's some potential there. They don't seem to abuse the spray tool or anything, which is nice. But a few lakes that were larger than one tile would be nice. And maybe make the water in the lakes and rivers have at least somewhat similar colors. And seriously, I have no idea what those pink and red and yellow tiles are supposed to be. My first thought was that maybe they were towns or something, but the colors just make no sense.

Walkabouts are extremely simplistic. I can tell that they're little groups of army guys. They're, uh, bright green and magenta. Seriously, I want my troops to have better colored uniforms. Let the enemy have ugly colors. A better idea for the walkabouts might be a single person, like the leader of the army or something. These are just kinda ugly.

Battle graphics are bad in a serious, and by that I mean hilarious, way. Their stepping frame is a horizontal mirror of their standing frame. That's right, I'm talking about the hero graphics, not the walkabouts. I don't know about you, but when I take a step my entire body doesn't usually face the opposite direction. I can't imagine how the creator thought this looked good. Also their eyes glow when they attack. They're just using guns so I dunno why that would happen.

Anyway, battle backdrops are obviously MS-painted. One good point, I guess, is that the trees in the background seem to match the style of the trees on the map. But then, both are ugly, so it's not all that good in the end. Also there were weird gray lines on all of the backdrops. I dunno what that was all about.

The title screen is pure comedy gold.

Storyline

This is the high point, low as it may be. A major advantage this has over most newbie games is that it actually tells you where to go in the game. It has a plotscripted intro too, with poorly drawn cutscenes and even some camera movement. It was great to see this effort put in.

The basic story is that a big empire is taking resources from the smaller nations and leaving them poor and starving. You begin the game with two armies from some of these smaller nations who're rising up against the evil empire. Okay, that's good enough for me. The backstory was short enough that it wasn't boring. Unfortunately, I think there's a missing "wait for text box" command in there somewhere cause the last text box in the backstory disappears shortly after it shows up.

The story doesn't really go anywhere though. You're supposed to infiltrate this enemy camp, but all you do is walk through it. There's no boss or item hunting or anything, there are just regular enemies. And you can just run away from them so there's nothing that actually requires you to do any fighting.

There was actually an end of demo message, which impressed me.

Gameplay

Speed starts at 10 and 11. It needs to be doubled.

There need to be more abilities than just the default attack. This system will never work and cannot be interesting.

Debug keys are still on. Bad!

I really liked that the author made liberal use of editing the global strings. It seemed like most of the strings had been changed. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but I like to see it.

Battle

There is only one attack and no useable items. You hold the spacebar. You will face no challenge whatsoever. There was no effort put into making these battles any fun at all. Luckily, encounters occurred at a reasonable rate.

Map Design

I'm pretty sure the first half (why was it divided into two halves?) was just a straight line of road. I don't just mean that it was linear, it was a vertical line down the center of the map that never moved to the side at all. The second half was slightly less of a straight line, but it still wasn't any more interesting.

Balance

Haha. None whatsoever. You will plow through your enemies like they are nothing. But you'll do it slowly.

Music

It was not the best. The Wandering Hamster town and victory themes were in it. The latter didn't bother me so much but the former made no sense. We're at war!

The battle theme at least sounded battle-ish, but it was still boring.

Enjoyment

Did I enjoy this game? No. However, it wasn't enough to make me hate it. It's not painful, because it's not really much of anything.

Final Blows

It's got a couple good points. You seriously need to put more effort into graphics and gameplay though. If I can win battles by holding the spacebar, then either they shouldn't be there or should be improved.

Not worth the download.

My troops are neon green and magenta? I want to switch sides.

Final Scores

Graphics: 1/10.0

It's a start. But so far it's only a start.

Storyline: 3/10.0

There was some quality here.

Gameplay: 1/10.0

Nope.

Music: 2/10.0

Some of it was okay, some was not.

Enjoyment: 1/10.0

No, not yet.

Overall Grade:
F-

Final Thoughts

Keep working on it, you'll get better. But everyone else should probably stay away from it.